Digital contracting and the benefits

Learn all about digital contracting, what it means and how digitalizing your contract processes benefits not just your legal team, but your commercial team too.

Navigate through the article
See Summize in action
Published: 

December 1, 2024

What is digital contracting?

Digital contracting is a process that transforms the entire contract lifecycle into a digitalized and collaborative workflow. It facilitates the contract lifecycle process by connecting the dots between business stakeholders, processes and data.

Digital transformation of contract management

The digital transformation of contract management has been rapidly accelerated in recent years, championed by sales, marketing, HR, finance, and recruitment. It's time for legal teams and contract processes to benefit from the same level of digital transformation provided by digital contracting.

Digital contracting frees your legal teams and empowers the business

Digital contracting software helps legal professionals by automating repetitive manual processes, allowing teams to focus on high-value tasks. Plus, by integrating with other business productivity tools such as Microsoft WordSalesforce, Microsoft Teams and Slack, business colleagues are empowered with intelligent technology that guides them through contract processes without the legal jargon.

We have been working with Summize for three and a half years, and we love the tool. It’s simple and easy to use, and the team has been so helpful and dedicated to improving our processes.

Colin Bell, Director of Procurement at Gamma

The key benefits of AI-powered digital contracting software

Your digital front door to legal

Businesses are governed by contracts, across sales, procurement, HR, marketing and more. Digital contracting integrates contract processes into familiar tools to maximize adoption and reduce friction. Summize's digital contracting software centralizes contract requests into existing workflows, including Microsoft Outlook, Teams, HubSpot, Gmail and Slack, to speed up contract processes and enable self-serve behaviors throughout the business.

With this decentralized approach, you eliminate the need for lengthy training and disjointed processes. Meet users where they already work, for a more accessible front door to legal

Any contract, one process

From sales, to HR and marketing, digital contracting is designed to support all types of commercial contracts, across the full contract lifecycle. Create, negotiate, review, and store your contracts, making the data inside them useful and usable.

Actionable insights

Missed renewals cost time and money. Digital contracting unlocks intelligent contractual information, allowing you to make better informed decisions and understand your business. With Summize's digital contracting software, you can automatically extract key dates and add them to your calendar, with built-in email reminders. Never miss a key date again.

Maximum adoption

Tech heavy tools and poorly designed Ul slows down businesses and causes bottlenecks in the process. Summize’s user experience is simple and intuitive, requiring minimal user training. It fits seamlessly into existing ways of working for fast and easy rollout across the entire business.

The secret to success in digital contracting is to ensure best-fit across all teams. It's a business solution, not just a legal one.

Further benefits of digital contracting

Businesses run on contracts. HR have employment contracts, Marketing use supplier contracts, Sales teams need MSAs - the list goes on! And better management across the contract lifecycle can reap significant rewards.

Digital contracting connects people, data, and processes to accelerate the end-to-end contract lifecycle, providing users with meaningful analytics and data for smarter business decision-making. Summize is created by legal experts and powered by AI to digitalize legal processes.

Additional benefits:

  • Shorter contract lifecycles
  • Faster revenue generation and shorter negotiation periods
  • Mitigated risk across the organization
  • Improved collaboration between in-house legal teams and business colleagues
  • Smarter business decision-making
  • Increased efficiency across contractual processes
  • Enhanced and automated workflows
  • Accelerated contract management and analysis capabilities

Digital contracting for in-house legal teams

Contract processes are traditionally manual, complex and almost always lacking understanding, preventing legal teams from being true business leaders. Managing contracts across the full contract lifecycle is challenging when legal must deal with multiple live contracts simultaneously. This isn't uncommon - with most large businesses managing 19,000 contracts each year on average (EY).

Summize launched the world’s first Integrated Contract Lifecycle Management solution, and this decentralized approach to embedding experiences within existing tools continues today. It makes digital contracting processes simpler and smarter, from contract requests to creating a repository. Summize brings intelligence, speed, and consistency to your digital contracts with optimized and automated workflows.

Accelerated contract reviews

Summize speeds up the end-to-end contract lifecycle by automating tasks that were traditionally manual. Legal teams can review contracts in under 2 minutes and negotiate directly from Microsoft Word 85% quicker.

Smarter business decision making

Summize gives businesses access to better decision-making and actionable insights; summarizing risk and highlighting potential cost savings across every contract, while accelerating revenue opportunities.

Optimized efficiency

Centralize requests and intake via Teams, Outlook, Salesforce and Slack, enabling self-service contract creation in a unique Q&A chatbot experience. In-house legal teams can track, triage and manage requests from across the business, resulting in huge time savings and efficiency gains.

Digital contracting for sales

Contracts are found across every team within a business, from HR to Marketing, but alongside Legal, Sales teams work with them almost every day. Research shows that 80% of B2B Sales teams process over 500 contracts each month, but 59% of Business Development professionals state that inefficiencies in their contracting process resulted in lost opportunities. So it’s essential to get your contract solution right.

Contracts sit at the center of every business relationship - they define a business's path for growth, revenue, and profit. So, inefficiencies in the contract lifecycle lead to slower sales cycles, friction, bottlenecks, and delays between legal and the rest of the business.

Digital contracting facilities the contract lifecycle and reduces these inefficiencies by establishing a relationship between the stakeholders, existing processes, and data to accelerate the end-to-end contract lifecycle. Digital contracting by Summize unites legal teams and business stakeholders to accelerate the entire contract lifecycle.

Faster revenue generation

Summize centralizes contract requests through Microsoft Teams, Outlook, HubSpot and Slack in a simple Q&A experience. Business users can create contracts using approved legal clauses and send requests, which are automatically tracked and analyzed.

Shorter contract cycles

With Summize's intelligent CLM solution, create and review contracts faster, more consistently and more efficiently. Your business users can create contracts in under two minutes and complete a first pass review in less than five. Controlled and governed by legal, contract workflows are accessible to the wider business. Sales teams will enjoy faster negotiations, equaling faster revenue for the business.

Self-serve capabilities

Summize's self-service contracting, integrated with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Gmail and Slack, speeds up negotiation and contract cycles. Commercial users can generate approved contracts and close deals faster, all without needing legal intervention.

See Summize in action

To see how you could implement digital contracting processes in your business, book a Summize demo today. Our contract experts will show you Summize's CLM and how simple it can be to digitalize your contract processes.

About the author

Jonny Jessop

Head of Presales

As the Head of Presales at Summize, Jonny brings over 8 years of SaaS experience with a strong focus on technical sales and presales. Jonny has played a pivotal role in expanding Summize’s client base across diverse industries. This is driven by his expertise in AI contract analysis and prompt engineering. Through this expertise, and his knowledge of implementing AI-driven playbooks, Jonny is able to show clients how to leverage AI to automate contract intake and review processes. By doing so, Jonny enables in-house legal teams to streamline workflows and to modernise their Contract Lifecycle Management.

LinkedIn icon